Education Research

An archive of research links and resources highlighting preschool,
kindergarten and child research studies, conducted by educational and
independent sources and how they relate to childhood development, family
cohesiveness and educational values.

Contaminated groundwater accumulating under the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has risen 60cm above the protective barrier, and is now freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean, the plant's operator TEPCO has admitted.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which is responsible for decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, on Saturday said the protective barriers that were installed to prevent the flow of toxic water into the ocean are no longer coping with the groundwater levels, Itar-Tass reports. The contaminated groundwater, which mixes with radioactive leaks seeping out of the plant, has already risen to 60cm above the barriers - the fact which TEPCO calls a major cause of the massive daily leak of toxic substances. Earlier on Friday, the company announced it started pumping out contaminated groundwater from under Fukushima, and managed to pump out 13 tons of water in six hours on Friday. TEPCO also said it plans to boost the pumped-out amount to some 100 tons a day with the help of a special system, which will be completed by mid-August. This will be enough to seal off most of the ongoing ocean contamination, according to TEPCO's estimates.

Another exciting day for kinda lethal at-home science! Fans of birthday cakes note that what you are about to see is graphic in nature.

3D-printed guns have been making the news a lot recently. That's not to say that they and their creators don't deserve the press - people arming themselves without so much as a permit is pretty terrifying. But whoever it was that said 3D printing was the only way for people to circumvent the law and arm themselves just might not have seen this bad boy. This fully-automatic Gauss gun, dubbed the CG-42, has a 15-round capacity and can fire an entire clip of ammo in 1.5 seconds. What it fires is almost as frightening as the gun itself, because the CG-42 is armed with nails, side-stepping the need for even the slightest of paper trails.

"A Culture that views pigs as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly the human mind can conceive will view its citizens the same way-and other cultures." - Joe Salatin

We associate food with, at most, pleasure-at the very least, survival. It's not too different for animals. Lambs turned out on new grass move "quickly over certain grasses to get to others-to nosh on clover and mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way," writes Dan Barber in A Chef Speaks Out. Wild pigs, capable of seeking out the nutrients they need,"enjoy eating nuts, roots, fruits, mushrooms, bugs, rabbits and, occasionally, dead animals." But what happens when animals are confined in cramped, filthy environments and force-fed monoculture diets of genetically modified (GMO) corn and soy? A lot can happen. Calves are born too weak to walk, with enlarged joints and limb deformities. Piglets experience rapidly deteriorating health, a "failure to thrive" so severe that they start breaking down their own tissues and organs-self-cannibalizing-to survive. Many animals suffer from weak, brittle bones that easily fracture. Dairy cows develop mastitis, a painful udder infection. Beef cattle develop liver abscesses and an excruciating condition referred to as "twisted gut."

A team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have achieved what appears to be the "holy grail" of water splitting technology for the production and storage of clean, abundant energy. Because sunlight is free, I'm calling this "free energy.

To understand this breakthrough, it's important to first understand why solar power has so many limitations. Solar is great when the sun is shining, but storing solar power require the deployment of a large array of heavy, expensive and toxic electrical storage devices known as "deep cycle batteries." To put it in street terms, deep cycle battery technology sucks. The batteries suck, the chemicals suck, the weight sucks and the cost sucks. There is absolutely nothing to like about batteries unless you enjoy hulking around with heavy, useless objects.

Honey bees, Apis mellifera, are one of the most important pollinators of agricultural crops. Recent declines in honey bee populations in many North American and European countries and increasing cultivation of crops that require insects for pollination.

We collected pollen carried by foraging honey bees returning to the hive for nine hives in seven crops: almond, apple, blueberry, cranberry, cucumber, pumpkin, and watermelon. For each crop, we selected three fields that were separated by at least 3.2 km. Hives were deployed in these fields for pollination services based on growers' needs. Within each selected field, we chose the three honey bee hives with the strongest foraging forces by observing flight in the bee yard for 5-10 min, and attached plastic pollen traps (Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, Moravian Falls, NC) to these hives. Pollen traps collect the pollen pellets bees carry on their hind tibiae in flattened regions called corbiculae. Bees use this pollen to make food for larvae inside the nest. We checked traps after three days, and removed them if they contained at least 5 g of pollen. Traps with less than 5 g remained on hives until they contained 5 g of pollen or for 10 days. We placed pollen removed from traps in 50 mL centrifuge tubes and stored the samples on ice until they could be transferred to a -29°C freezer in the lab.

This photo from the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, it's one of those pictures NASA likes to release to the public in an effort to remind us that they A) exist and B) can do stuff besides bum rides from the Russians to the International Space Station.

Recalling the famed "family portrait" that the late, great Carl Sagan led the Voyager team to create in 1990, the Earth is in the picture. And much like the "pale blue dot" section of Sagan's famous photo mosaic, the Earth is very, very small. This latest photograph, which shows Saturn in all her majesty, actually includes the Earth only as a cosmic afterthought. Of course, our beautiful blue marble is a cosmic afterthought. Heck, Saturn is neither the largest of our planets, nor the farthest from home; those honors belong to Jupiter and Neptune, respectively. Nonetheless, the photograph is as humbling as any image that accurately depicts our infinitesimal smallness against the backdrop of God's infinite creation.

A pair of Pentagon-funded hackers prove it]s possible to take control of your car with a few keystrokes. Time for Detroit to wake up.

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop-or even slow down-produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV's chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets-along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat. Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day's experiments...

Researchers at NASA's Texas-based Johnson Space Center are trying to prove that it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light, and hope to one day build an engine that resembles the fictional Starship Enterprise.

NASA physicist and engineer Dr. Harold G. White, 43, believes it is possible to bend the rules of time and space that Albert Einstein constructed when he postulated that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light. White's research is based on the theories of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who in 1994 theorized that exceeding Einstein's galactic speed limit was possible if scientists discovered a way to harness the expansion and contraction of space. And Harold and his team are trying to do just that.

The world's first human-powered helicopter by a Canadian engineer has won the Sikorsky Prize after performing a minute-long flight at an altitude of 3.3 meters - fueled only by the pilot's pedaling of a modified bicycle.

The AHS Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition was established in 1980, in search for the first successful controlled flight of a human powered helicopter. The helicopter had to reach a height of three meters while hovering for at least one minute in a ten-square-meter area. The competition's $250,000 prize had never previously been awarded, with numerous creative engineers trying and failing to meet the criteria. "The AHS Sikorsky Prize challenged the technical community to harness teamwork, technical skills, and cutting edge technologies to meet requirements that were on the ragged edge of feasibility," Mike Hirschberg, AHS International Executive Director, said in a statement.